Re: EGL vs. Java

Joe,

The particular programming group I'm in is responsible for something on the order of a thousand source members, a small portion of our total system. A single filter with all of them takes 5 to 10 minutes to refresh with our box, and even without refreshing takes about 15 seconds to expand on my 2 GHz Core 2 Duo - I built the filter once to try it, and decided it was more trouble than it's worth, since I didn't know a way to position within the filter (in table view) that was as quick as the positioning dialog in PDM. Since there are often several possibilities for member name prefixes for a given function, I often have to try 2 or 3 times to find what I'm looking for. (Yeah, the naming conventions are old and terrible - can't do much about that at the moment.) PDM is very quick for that; I can't say the same for my multiple attempts at making filters that will get me to what I want.

Have you used RSE against a very large system? Are there tricks I'm not seeing for how to make the access faster? An unfiltered drill-down into our production source library, just to see the 20 or so objects in it, takes between 15 minutes and half an hour. Drilling into the QRPGLESRC in that library takes longer than that. WRKOBJPDM on that library and WRKMBRPDM on that file take a second or two.

How often do I need to do it? Sometimes I go a week without needing it, other times I use it repeatedly in the same day - often with my boss or some other programmer standing over me. How do I justify to them taking 20 seconds to 20 minutes using RSE to do something that they know they can do in 2 seconds using PDM? It isn't so bad looking it up in PDM, Alt-Tabbing to WDSCi, and doing a Ctrl-Shift-A to open it - they can see the advantages of the color coding, outline view, and search functions. It's also easy to show the advantages of RSE filters over the development libraries - it's just during the research and analysis phase when we have to look at the production stuff that I get frustrated.

So, suggestions?

Dave Shaw

----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Websphere Development Studio Client for iSeries" <wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 2:30 PM
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] EGL vs. Java

Dave Shaw wrote:

I agree with Tom. I'll happily give up SEU, SDA, and RLU, but until there's
a graphical interface that provides sub-second access to thousands of
objects or members without building a filter first, PDM is a very valuable
tool. You don't want to know how long it takes RSE to list the handful of
source files (with, as I said, thousands of members) in our production
source library on a simple drill-down.

Dave, I'm wondering why you have to qualify this with "without building
a filter first". Once you have a filter, access is very fast. And you
only need to refresh them when someone adds a new member.

How often do you actually have to page through a source file to find a
member? Is it possible that filters would actually make your job
easier? I'm not meaning to poke, because I know its not joyous to run
through large lists in RSE, but the point of filters is that your job
shouldn't require you to run through large lists on a regular basis -
that's more of a 5250 artifact.

I'm eyeing this change with a bit of dread. Our machines are P50s with
roughly 150 developers. I could see someone deciding that everyone gets
ADTS only as a cost-saving measure. It would be so much easier to argue the
case for getting RDi for those of us who want to use it if PDM wasn't part
of the equation so that we would never need ADTS again...

I guess maybe I don't understand the need for paging through source
files, and even if you do need that, I don't understand why refreshing
the filter once a day, say when you log on, isn't enough.

By the way, does the table view help you at all? I like it because I
can sort the list and dynamically subset by text strings and so on. It
really makes things a lot easier for green screeners.

Joe